1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an information processing apparatus, an information processing system, an information processing method, and a storage medium.
2. Description of the Related Art
In recently years, books, which have conventionally been published in the form of paper printed books, have also become available in the form of electronic books. Terminals for viewing electronic books have different display screens with different resolutions or sizes. Thus, an electronic book is often provided in a reflow format, which allows the layout of the electronic book to be changed according to the display screen size or the character size. Electronic Publication (EPUB) (registered trademark), which is a format defined by the International Digital Publishing Forum (IDPF), is an example of the format of a reflow format electronic book. EPUB is used as a standard format.
While a mobile terminal is also used as a viewing terminal, a mobile terminal has a display screen that is small relative to the size of paper. Thus, if a page of a typical document format is displayed in full page on a display screen having a small screen size, the characters become too small, and thus a user may not be able to recognize the displayed content. In such a case, the user needs to scroll the page or enlarge/reduce the display in order to recognize the content of the displayed page, leading to a problem that such operations are troublesome to the user.
The reflow format display through the EPUB format or the like described above can solve this problem. The reflow format does not have a fixed page format, and character typesetting can be changed according to the character size. Specifically, in the reflow format, as the character size increases, the number of characters that fit in a single page decreases, which in turn leads to an increase in the number of pages required to display the entire electronic book. In this manner, in the reflow format, character typesetting is changed according to the character size, and thus the reflow format provides a flexible display environment that is compatible with a wide variety of display screen sizes.
In addition, an electronic book is viewed by a plurality of users, and is shared among a plurality of terminals. As a system for sharing a document among a plurality of terminals, Japanese Patent Application Laid-Open No. 7-79288 discusses an electronic conference system for sharing a document among a plurality of terminals.
In this electronic conference system, a conference server transmits a document file to a conference terminal that has an application capable of displaying a document file format. Meanwhile, the conference server transmits image data, which is obtained by rasterizing the document into the images of a page format, to a conference terminal that does not have the application capable of displaying the document file format.
As described above, in the reflow format, a position where a page breaks depends on the character size and the display screen size. Thus, if the display screen size differs among the viewing terminals used by the users or if the character size set in the display screen differs among the terminals, the page break position varies among the terminals even when the same document is displayed. In other words, a document displayed in a reflow format does not include fixed page identification information. As the document does not include the page identification information as described above, there exists a problem that user convenience of the document decreases.
For example, when the same document is simultaneously viewed by a plurality of users at a conference in an office or during a class at a school, the users may need to share information located at the same position. With a typical book or printed document, the information located at the same position can be shared by a plurality of users when, for example, one of the users specifies the position with a page number (page identification information), which is a shared configuration, by saying “please look at the middle section on page 3.”
However, the page break position is not fixed in the reflow format document data, and thus there exists a problem in that it is difficult to specify a position within document data by using the page identification information.